The Marines performed this thankless mission competently, but it meant that
it took longer and was more dangerous than it might have been. Was that in
part a result of announcing
in advance to all and sundry just exactly where the Marines would be going
and what they would be doing? Might that have been intentional, to add an air
of courage and accomplishment to the mission, making for better propaganda?
I don’t know.

Of course, propaganda is always part of a well-thought-out counter-insurgency
strategy. Creating
an image of noble heroes overcoming odds and managing to kill quite a few
Taliban and insurgents along the way might have been part
of a solid strategy.

That thought, however, was somewhat undermined by the news that, as a Washington
Post story had it, "The Afghan official responsible for governing
Marjah paid his first visit to this strife-torn community" on or about
Feb. 22. Let me repeat that: his first visit. He wasn’t a respected local elder
who was known in the community but had been forced to leave for a short while
and would be likely to be welcomed back. No, Haji Zahir, the newly-appointed
mayor of Marjah, had spent the last 15
years in Germany. Where he had been jailed. That would surely let
the locals know that the central Afghan government had great respect for Marjah’s
local traditions and local leaders.

According to this Washington
Post story, the locals were appropriately skeptical. When Zahir said
the U.S. Marines were "not here to occupy our country. They’re just here
to bring you peace," a local grumbled, "The Taliban provided us a
very peaceful environment. … They weren’t corrupt like the police." The
locals didn’t want help from the central government, they just wanted
to be left alone – some of them to grow opium poppies. Who wouldn’t, since
prohibition creates such a huge premium for opium over alternative crops?

Then the potentially good propaganda was undermined a bit by the fact that
during the course of the offensive, despite assurance from U.S. military officials
that they had learned lessons from previous encounters and there would be a
minimum
of bombing that might kill innocent civilian bystanders, exactly that occurred.
A NATO helicopter mission reputedly hunting for militants who had escaped the
Marjah area and managed to get 150 miles away ended up killing as many as 27
civilians. All concerned were publicly befuddled. An Afghan National Army commander
said his forces hadn’t called in the helicopter strike, and Dutch military
officials – it was in an area purportedly controlled by the Dutch – said they
hadn’t either.

Well, fog of war and all that. Mistakes are always made and collateral
damage is perhaps inevitable.

The clincher for me, however, came in an article in the eminently establishment
(though unusually open to different perspectives) Web
site for Foreign Policy magazine, started by the Carnegie Endowment
and now owned by the Washington Post Co. The article is by Thomas Johnson,
who teaches national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey
(which does also tolerate our old friend David Henderson), and Chris Mason,
a retired State Department officer who served in Afghanistan. They have previously
compared Afghanistan to Vietnam,
at a
pretty deep level [.pdf]. In "Down
the AfPak Rabbit Hole," they compared U.S. "strategy" in
Afghanistan, and the Marjah campaign in particular, to Alice in Wonderland.
Some examples:

"Two months ago the collection of mud-brick hovels known as Marjah
might have been mistaken for a flyspeck on maps of Afghanistan. Today the media
has nearly doubled its population from
50,000 to 80,000
… and portrays the offensive there as the equivalent of the Normandy invasion,
and the beginning of the end for the Taliban. In fact, however, the entire
district of Nad Ali, which contains Marjah, represents about 2 percent
of Regional Command (RC) South, the U.S. military’s operational area that encompasses
Helmand, Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Nimruz, and Daykundi provinces. RC South
by itself is larger than all of South Vietnam, and the Taliban controls virtually
all of it. This appears to have occurred to no one in the media.

"Nor have any noted that this nearly worthless postage stamp of real
estate has tied down about half of all the real combat power and aviation assets
of the international coalition in Afghanistan for a quarter of a year. The
possibility that wasting massive amounts of U.S. and British blood, treasure,
and time just to establish an Afghan Potemkin village with a ‘government
in a box‘ might be exactly what the Taliban wants the coalition
to do has apparently not occurred to either the press or to the generals who
designed this operation."

Although the Afghan war at a macro level
is a disaster fated to be regretted for a long time to come – whether it
peters out gradually and most U.S. troops are withdrawn in 16 months or so
or substantial U.S. forces are stationed there for decades, which is the only
way to do nation-building in a country that has no particular desire to be
a nation as Westerners understand the term. But one might have supposed that
at least a few of the tactical operations involved could have been well-designed
and well-executed, with something resembling a serious counterinsurgency purpose
that actually accomplished some short-term gain.

However, the invasion of Marjah appears to be little more than a public relations
or propaganda gesture, designed to make it seem that the "coalition"
troops are doing something to earn their keep and the commanders can take some
initiative. I will admit that some
believe that Marjah is a more important Taliban stronghold than Johnson
and Mason do and that the campaign just might have an influence beyond the
tiny geographical area that it covers. But I’m skeptical, and I’ll let Johnson
and Mason have the last word:

"So here we are in the AfPak Wonderland, complete with a Mad Hatter
(the clueless and complacent media), Tweedledee and Tweedledum (the military,
endlessly repeating itself and history), the White Rabbit (the State Department,
scurrying to meetings and utterly irrelevant), the stoned Caterpillar (the
CIA, obtuse, arrogant, and asking the wrong questions), the Dormouse (U.S.
Embassy Kabul, who wakes up once in a while only to have his head stuffed in
a teapot), the Cheshire Cat (President Obama, fading in and out of the picture,
eloquent but puzzling), the Pack of Cards army (the Afghan National Army, self-explanatory),
and their commander, the inane Queen of Hearts (Afghan President Hamid Karzai).
(In Alice in Wonderland, however, the Dormouse is ‘suppressed’ by the
Queen of Hearts, not the White Rabbit or the Cheshire Cat, so the analogy is
not quite perfect.)"

Wonderful article, let the observers do the talking…… As soon as the empire can find about a million plus [additional] troops, they can repeat this "success" in thirty three other wasteland locations out of the thousands available…OOOOOOO For Joy……!!!!! Ditto ten million in three hundred thirty places….The possibilities are endless, not the troops and money…!!! Oh well……